Produce the Note – pro-active steps when facing foreclosure

Are you in or facing foreclosure? To protect yourself and your property, ask your lender to produce your original mortgage note.

A request to produce the note requires the lender to prove it actually has the authority to foreclose on you.  The lender must officially produce the original promissory note, with your signature, in the lawsuit.

Your goal with this process is to make certain the institution foreclosing is, in fact, the owner of the note. There is only one original note for your mortgage that has your signature on it. This is the document that proves you owe the debt.

In the past few years, many mortgage notes have been sold and re-sold to other institutions and investment companies either individually or, more often, when bundled together as huge securitized packages on Wall Street. These sales were done so often and so quickly that, many times, proper documentation did not follow the exchanges resulting in the final institution who’s collecting the debt not having paperwork to verify their legal right to collect.  In fact, this happens about 1/2 the time!

When you receive a foreclosure notice, it may state somewhere that “…the Mortgage note has either been lost or destroyed and the Plaintiff is unable to state the manner in which this occurred.” In other words, they are admitting they don’t have the note that would prove they have a right to foreclose.

One problem here that you definitely want to avoid is the possibility that another institution, which may have bought your note along the way, will also try to collect the same debt from you again.  This, in fact, does happen.

Another huge problem to prevent is all the unnecessary and, arguably, illegal fees that are added during the process.

A request to produce the note is not a strategy to get your home for free or to eliminate your responsibility for your debt.   Your goal here is to protect yourself from being sued illegally and to encourage your lender  to assist you in a work-out or repayment plan that will allow you to keep your home. Many lenders are less willing to work with debtors today and this “produce the note” strategy is one way to get them to negotiate with you.

For steps and paperwork to help you with this legal effort, check out  the Consumer Warning Network.